


and don't you dare be late

by irnan



Series: interesting landings [3]
Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 17:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or, Peggy Carter is accidentally sent time-travelling by mind-controlled rogue Nazi secret agents. (If anyone ever asked, honesty would compel her to admit that this is probably not the strangest thing to ever happen to her; those come <i>after</i> the time travel.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	and don't you dare be late

**Author's Note:**

> fixit!fic for Peggy and Steve. The Management requests that all Tourists remove or neutralise their shame glands before commencing the Tour and reminds them that Coherent Plot Detectors are banned from the premises. Your Real Science and your Earth Logic will also be returned to you at the exit.

It's half past nine on Wednesday morning, because in Peggy's experience these things always happen on a Wednesday, and there is a man in the doorway holding a gun on her.

"Good God Howard," she says out loud. "You promised me this place was secure." If he was here, she would hit him. On the other hand, the fact that he is not means that he, at least, is not about to get shot...

"Step away from ze device," says the man. He is wearing a balaclava, but his accent is distinctly German.

"Certainly," Peggy says, holding her hands up and stepping to the left. She isn't entirely sure what device he means, but it appears a safe bet that it's boxed up in the crate to her right - that is the only one big enough. Howard's California storage is meant to be the safest place on Earth to hide their research on the Cube and HYDRA's technology, but apparently Peggy and the SSR were deluding themselves about that.

What else has Howard got in here? He probably doesn't know himself. Peggy stands steady as the man comes into the room, followed by four - six others. Was Howard still upstairs when they arrived, or had he left already?

"Have you hurt him?"

One or two of them turn their heads towards her, but no answer is forthcoming. Peggy manages, by some feat of willpower, to keep her face composed. The first one - still point his gun at her - gestures to his followers, indicating the crate. They move in quickly, tear it apart, wrench away the paper, the protective padding. It's a sort of - Peggy has not the faintest idea what it is. Silver-grey and shimmering, it has a triangular base and three arms stretching upwards that angle and meet in the middle, around as tall as a human being of average height. Where the three spindly arms meet, precisely over the centre of the simple base of the construction, they form a holding-point for a strange red stone. It is, somewhat to Peggy's relief, not glowing.

That changes when one of the men fishes an odd silver rod out of his pack. It comes easily apart in his hands, two pieces each with a half-circle of metal at the end, and Peggy understands that they are meant to clamp around the stone and do... well, she's none too interested in waiting long enough to find out. The snap as the rod fixes itself around the stone is her signal; she steps in close when the leader turns his head to look at the device and grasps the wrist that holds his gun, forcing it away from her and at his men. It goes off, deafeningly loud in the relatively small space of the storage room, and Peggy is backhanded across the face, flung at the device - someone shouts, " _Nicht_ , pack sie!" but she crashes full tilt into the silly-looking thing, and the world goes red.

  
  
When she manages to find her feet again, blinking the glow of the stone out of her eyes, she's in a rather larger space than before, though it's still concrete from floor to ceiling. People are shouting, there is gunfire; one of the attackers is dead almost at her feet, so she snatches his gun and shoots a second who was aiming at her, and then her legs give out and she staggers, someone catches her, more shouting, and for the first time in her entire life Peggy Carter faints.

  
She wakes to dim yellow light and a dark-haired woman by her bedside. Good God, what _is_ she wearing - Peggy has never laid eyes on material like that before. Furthermore she is armed and Peggy is not.

Peggy hates situations like this. The last time was at Vichy in '44 when they were sidetracked over there to stop a French contraband runner selling the HYDRA weapons he had found in a ruined base to the idiot collaborateur Generals. At least this time she is not tied to a chair. But then again, this time Bucky is not on hand with a sniper rifle, and Steve...

It still twists things in her heart to remember that she and Steve will never plan an attack nor execute a raid together again.

"Agent Peggy Carter," the stranger says, "SSR, MI6. We were a little surprised, but your fingerprints and your bloodwork and your DNA all match."

Ah, the transfer. It still sounds strange on Peggy's tongue, in her ears.

"That's right," she says, and finds herself hoarse. The other woman helps her sit up and hands her a cup of water, which Peggy eagerly sips at. "Thank you. You are?"

"Agent Maria Hill, Head of Security for SHIELD. I know, I probably don't look like I'm very good at my job right now."

Peggy smiles - keep it friendly, keep it gentle. "Neither do I," she says. "Tell me, what's SHIELD?"

Hill pauses. "Well. If you thought of it as the follow-up to the SSR - that would be... that would not be inaccurrate."

"I hadn't realised the SSR _needed_ a follow-up."

"Agent Carter," says the other woman gently, "tell me, what's today's date?"

"The third of July," says Peggy automatically. Day before Steve's birthday. Independence Day! Bucky had crowed at her triumphantly in the pub that one time, and she and Monty had laughed at him in chorus: well-shot-of-that-lot-day, m'boy...

Hill looks at her steadily. Peggy swallows hard.

"1946," she says.

"Fifth of March," says Hill gently. "2015."

Peggy drops the cup of water onto the floor by her bed. Her hands are shaking; she is sure she's gone pale. Ignoring the puddle on the floor, Hill gestures, silently, around the room, and Peggy can see, now: all the strange technology, the blinking screens, the different designs even just of the bed she lies in. She doesn't know yet whether or not to trust Agent Hill, but one thing is for certain: this is not what she is used to in terms of hospital rooms.

"Where were you?"

Another loaded question. "Cali - ach." She coughs, not faked, though it still gives her time to think. "Sorry. California. Malibu, at Stark Industries. I had a meeting with Howard Stark."

"According to our records you were arranging storage for the research done on the Tesseract during the war," says Hill. "When Howard died that research was returned to SHIELD."

Peggy is breathing hard. Hill knows too much - if this is a trick -

But Peggy is very much afraid this is anything but a trick. "Howard is dead. Of course he is, it's sixty years later. Oh dear God. Where - where am I now?"  
"Nevada. To think we'd just finished remodelling the place. Lucky for you, really. Two years ago you would have found a lot of rubble, and no one to help with your friends."

"Who were they?"

"No positive identification yet. However, one of them carried a medallion shaped in the form of a HYDRA symbol."

"It fits, they were Germans - well, the two I heard speak were Germans."

"Noted, thank you."

"The, uh, device..."

"I'm afraid it's pretty mangled. When you're up to it, we'll need you to tell us how that happened..."

"I fought them, the leader hit me and I stumbled - he pushed me into it, or onto it." Peggy raises a hand to touch her face, realising for the first time that she is bruised and aching where the HYDRA man struck her.

"I see."

"But it will not be sending me home."

Hill pauses again and raises a hand to her right ear; under a loose sweep of hair she has a communicator device in her ear, it looks absolutely ingenious. She says, "Roger that - yes, go ahead," before turning her attention back to Peggy.

"I'm afraid, or rather the science guys are afraid, that it won't, Agent Carter. On the plus side..." suddenly she looks fond, and amused, and altogether more trustworthy than before, "I think you'll find there are - compensations."

She jerks her head over her shoulder at the door opposite Peggy, who stares at it: beat, beat, beat, footsteps on concrete, someone says, "Sir - yessir -" the door slides - slides! - back, and when Peggy sees the man in the doorway she rather wishes she hadn't already dropped her water cup. Her hands fall to the blanket on either side of her thighs and grip it tightly enough to hurt. She can't speak; all the blood's rushed to her head and she feels abhominably dizzy.

"Peggy," says Steve Rogers, and crosses the room in three quick strides to her side. "Peggy, my God..."

Oh, his hands, she remembers his hands, watching them draw, watching them sketch in maps, watching them load guns and carry comrades; his fingers are cold but they're solid and so is he and he's laughing, disbelieving, shaking with it, and so is she, like a frightened child, but finally she finds the strength to crawl into his arms and hide her face in his chest.

  
  
The scrape of a chair moving - Hill, standing up. "I'll be back," she says softly. "Cap, the others are on their way."

Peggy feels Steve nod. Hill's footsteps cross the room and the door closes behind her with a gentle snick.

Then and only then does Peggy start to cry. Steve is crying too, which is a comfort, crying and laughing both at once, and draws back at last to cradle her head in both his hands and say, "I don't believe it - _Peggy_ -"

She pulls him close and kisses him, laughing brokenly into his mouth. "Neither do I - this is a dream, a _fabulous_ dream - oh, Steve. Promise not to let me wake up."

"Pointless," he says, still kissing her. "Pointless. You're very much awake, and this is real, and I - I love you."

How many times has she wanted to kill herself for never even saying that much to him, explicitly, out loud?

"I love you too."

  
  
Steve sprawls across the bed with her, wearing workmen's jeans and a leather jacket. Peggy tucks her head under his chin, soaking up his body heat through her thin hospital gown, and feels the vibrations in his throat as he talks: being trapped in the ice, waking up, the Cube being found, alien Gods, Howard's son, SHIELD, battles, _Bucky_ , a team he loves. She smiles to hear it, pressed close against him, and could listen to his voice forever: his voice that will never be cut off so awfully again, leaving her with static and the echo of her own sobs. His hands spread big and firm over her back, one leg flung across hers as if to keep her trapped, keep her with him, keep her from floating away into nothingness. Peggy feels as though she might yet do just that were he not with her.

They've lain there for almost an hour when the door slides back again.

"Hey, Cap, is everybody decent?"

"Oh, God," says Steve. Peggy snorts in spite of herself, because she is certainly no such thing as decent: paper-thin hospital gown, face bruised and swollen, make-up vanished, hair a disgrace, eyes red and puffy with crying, clinging to Steve in ways that would be utterly humiliating were he not clinging right back.

"Barton, I swear," says a woman's voice outside.

"Steve, can we come in?"

"Yes, Bruce - thank you, Clint - come on in."

They file in: five men and a woman, mostly older than both Peggy and Steve, and then, older than he should be, scarred and sardonic but his smile hasn't changed: "And would you look at what the cat dragged in," says Bucky Barnes, amused, and Peggy cries, " _Oh_ \- you are the _worst_ ," and he catches her hands in his and bends to kiss her cheek.

"OK?" he asks her solemnly. They weren't ever close, but Peggy had liked him for Steve's sake at first and then his own; now it seems it's only the three of them left. And _what_ he's been through.

"Better," she says (better by far than she was this morning, yesterday, last year, VE Day: a hollow victory, every medal meaningless in that moment, coming too soon on the heels of her grief). "Are you?"

Bucky flicks his eyes left, in Steve's direction, and his mouth curls. "Same."

He stands back, and they start in on the introductions: Bruce, Clint, Natasha, Thor (who kisses Peggy's hand in welcome) and, finally, Tony Stark.

"Last but not least," he says, seeming restrained. He's wearing jeans and a shirt that says AC/DC under a smart jacket; catch Howard dead in an outfit like that!  
Howard _is_ dead.

"If there's one thing I'd go back for," says Peggy, mustering up a smile, "it would be to hit your father with something blunt and heavy. That place was supposed to be _secure_."

Next to her, Steve laughs softly. She leans against him, mostly to remind herself that he is, in fact, real and solid and present. "And you _believed_ him? Come on, Peggy. Remember Vichy? That warehouse started out impregnable -"

"And ended up six feet under and upside down," says Bucky, grinning. "It's probably still fenced off and smoking..."

Peggy laughs, long and loud, feeling as if it's the first time she's done so in years. "I remember. You could see it blow for miles, it was gorgeous, of course it gave Phillips a heart attack..."

"Getting out of bed in the morning could Phillips a heart attack some days," says Steve cheerfully.

"I remember when it used to do that to _you_ ," says Bucky, glaring.

"Well," says Steve, rueful, "yeah."

Peggy remembers the older-brother twitch of Bucky's mouth whenever he caught Steve doing something he considered stupid; she remembers, too, the way Steve learned to use it as well, and how neither of them were ever quite as relaxed as they were when they each knew the other was safe. She glances up, accidentally catching Tony Stark's eye. He winks at her. Peggy smiles at him.

"Welcome to the twenty-first century, Agent Carter."  
  
*********  
  
Once they let her out of the Nevada facility the first two things Peggy discovers about said twenty-first century - apart from the fact that it has Steve in it - is that it is loud and that it is colourful, and on the basis of those two things alone she falls in love.

Times Square in the spring dusk, incredible. She holds on tight to Steve's hand and twirls like a girl in the new shoes she bought with Pepper Potts the other day, laughing up at it. "It's even better than I pictured!"

"First thing I saw when I woke up," says Steve, "and it's - I mean, _look_ at it. The whole city's like this - just ten times _bigger_. It's amazing."

Peggy spins in close and hooks her arm through his, laughing. Her hair hangs strangely with so much less effort put into it, both heavier and lighter at once. "Howard said he'd come with me if I wanted. If it would help, after - after you were gone. But it didn't - I couldn't even think about it - I never left the hotel. I wanted to see New York again with _you_ , or no one. I could have walked the length and breadth of every city in America, but this one."

Steve bends down, kisses her. "All this time," he says, "I keep taking pictures of things and thinking, _Peggy would love that_ , and then _remembering_ , and feeling as if I'd been punched in the gut."

Peggy stretches up to kiss him again, right there on the pavement: just another giddy tourist lass kissing her love in a Times Square where the war is a distant memory, and they have put grief aside for good. Steve gathers her up and tilts their heads just a bit and - oooh.

They've become quite proficient at this already.

"Show me your pictures," she says when they separate.

He grins, a crooked sort of expression, loose and mischievous: the Brooklyn boy that never was, too ill and too poor for it, the young man who never was, too busy fighting for the very world he lived in. Peggy is beginning to recognise it as the expression of a man who has spent far too much time with Howard's wayward, fascinating son. (Considering Tony's deliberately-cultivated eccentricities, she finds it nothing short of adorable that he and Steve are so close.)

"Let me show you the real thing first," Steve says.  
  
*********  
  
Her father, that thundering gouty ridiculous old war horse, is dead. Of course he is. He was forty before he _married_ , for God's sake. In the months between their letters during the war his handwriting grew less and less neat, but his words remained the same. Peggy feels it as a sudden, aching loss that she no longer has his last letter with her. It lies folded neatly between the pages of her journal in her spare room at Howard's house, seventy years between her fingers and the crackling paper, the uncharacteristically gentle words: _my girl, you tell me you lost someone, and for once I don't know what to say to comfort you... come home when you are ready and let me try in person. He must have been exceptional indeed, though that will be no help to you now... Would I have liked him? I trust I would have. I trust you... Freddie misses you. I miss you, my girl, and am so very proud_.  
  
Peggy puts the other files away: not now, not yet.  
  
*********  
  
"I don't even know," says Tony, standing over the remains of the device that brought her here, "that it was _meant_ to be a time machine."

Peggy sighs and crosses her legs. She is sitting balanced on a crate of some kind, there has only ever been one chair in this workshop, according to Pepper, and Tony recently dissassembled it for parts.

What parts exactly and for what purpose are mysteries best left unanswered, in Peggy's opinion. She has seen what the Iron Man suit can do. It is terrible in every sense of the word.

"What else?" she asks.

Tony purses his lips, looks impressive and knowledgeable, destroys that by swinging the wrench in his hand in a silly circle and then just shrugs.

Peggy glares at him.

"Thor says it's not Asgardian tech. This, the frame, it's a kind of conductor wire. There are a couple minor similarities with vibranium, but this stuff is a lot less stable. When it was set off..." He makes a gesture with his hands indicative of fireworks, or a very destructive explosion. "The stone was the energy source, not as powerful as the Tesseract though... have you seen it?"

She has not. The clear colour has darkened to the dried red of old blood and the crack down the middle has split it almost in half.

"Not much to work with anymore," says Tony.

"Will you keep trying?"

"Not much point," he says bluntly. And then, not looking at her, "Why, did you want to go back?"

"No!"

Peggy surprises herself with the vehemence of her exclamation. What, lose all the mad confusing beauty of this place and time, all its possibilities, all its light and laughter?

Lose Steve again? (For she knows him, knows him now better than ever, and knows how much he loves this misfit band of men and women who make up the Avengers. He would not leave them, even for her: he would call that selfishness, and have the right of it in doing so.)

"No."

She does not want to return to the world she left in 1946, choked with rubble and grief. But she does want to understand, and more than that she needs to find a way to feel as if she has some control over her life again.  
  
*********  
  
Maria starts shaking her head at Peggy almost before the door shuts behind her. "Still no ID on them, except that they were HYDRA."

"This is ridiculous. And... rather frightening."

"Tony's dug up some of his father's old records on that thing. Apparently it was just a... weird-looking ornament to his grandfather. Howard put it in storage because of the similarities with vibranium, but he couldn't actually use it for his research during the war. I assume he never got round to looking at it."

"I still don't understand where this stone is even _from_."

Maria raises her eyebrows. "You're living in a Tower powered by arc reactor technology with a group of people who are physically enhanced beyond the supposedly humanly possible and a guy from another planet who's basically a God. One would have thought you had a talent for rolling with things you didn't understand."

Peggy drops into the empty chair. "It makes me feel powerless," she admits. "An enemy agent backhands me, and pouf! Time travel."

"You know, people assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect," says Maria, "but _actually_ , from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... timey wimey... stuff."

Peggy feels her own eyebrows climbing up her forehead.

"And you've never seen Doctor Who," says Maria. "That... must be corrected. I'll sort it out for you. But listen, the point is: sometimes things just happen."

Peggy leans forward to the desk, puts her elbow on it and props her chin on her hand. "Yes?" she says, affecting the most breathlessly interested voice she can. "And so, if Divine Providence decrees..."

Maria laughs. "I wouldn't like it either. But, Peggy: if I've understood Tony and Bruce right, and bear in mind that these are two of the smartest people on the planet we're talking about - there is literally nothing any of us can do about it except make the best of the hand we've - _you've_ \- been dealt."

"That might be the worst advice I have ever heard anyone give to another human being, and I spent two years on the front lines with the Howling Commandos," says Peggy. Then she adds, "It's certainly the most unwelcome."

"I'm sorry."

She sighs. "No, it... it will be all right. I just need to adjust."

"Well, you're dating the right guy to lend you a hand," Maria points out. "When I first met Steve he was so brittle you could have cracked him with a tap from a teaspoon if you'd known the right place to hit, and let me tell you, Tony Stark knows _all_ the right places to hit. I thought he'd relaxed before Barnes came back, let alone you."

"This is not about Steve," says Peggy firmly. "It's not his job to fix me."

"Of course not," says Maria promptly. Peggy thinks - though this may be her imagination, but Peggy thinks that Maria's respect for her has just ratcheted up a notch with that statement. "You have to fix yourself. I did. I just mean that sometimes it helps to have an example. A how-to guide."

Peggy hmphs. "Did you?"

Pause. "Not really." 

  
*********  
  
"I didn't notice it at first," Peggy explains to Pepper, "but they treat me the way the Commandos did - as though I'm their superior officer. I think they're fond of me - there is just... something else. And Tony certainly doesn't - certainly doesn't appear to act... well, I think he holds back when I'm there."

"They want you to like them," says Pepper sagely.

Peggy blinks. "I do."

"It's like dealing with little kids sometimes, or what I imagine dealing with little kids must be like," explains Pepper, easily mastering that motherly mixture of fond and irritated. "Look, Steve is... Steve has not had it easy, since he woke up, for all the obvious reasons. But because he's Steve he tends to let that... he doesn't ignore it, just doesn't always consider it as important as anything else that might be going on at any given moment, and he certainly doesn't consider it as important as the others. When they first met he and Tony blew up in each other's faces, and I think since then Steve hates letting his own issues influence the way he deals with the others. He said some stuff to Tony that was totally understandable but completely untrue. I mean, Tony was just as bad. And the others notice that, and they respect him for that and want him to be OK and of course he's the youngest as well which doesn't help. The thing with getting Bucky back and how the two of them just kind of - well, it was complicated. Watching them look after each other - yeah. But it comes back to this: Steve loves you, ergo you are important with a capital "I" and they want you to like them. Like babies. They did it to me for the first couple of months. Tony didn't notice either. Speaking of Tony, you knew - you know Howard, which rattles him, he usually goes off on people like that, see also his first meeting with Steve. But like I said, they want you to like them."

Peggy parses this slightly confusing speech with careful deliberation. "In short," she says at last, "there is nothing I can do about it?" (This is becoming her new motto.)

"Nothing," says Pepper, and takes a bite of pizza.

Marvellous. All that effort she put into it - all those conventions she flouted and people whose enmity she deservedly earned - and she has ended up displaced and out of step with the world without any other option but to vegetate as the Captain's girl after all.  
  
*********  
  
She cannot even say that out loud - it's sheer ingratitude to whatever gracious fate gave her (this place) (these people) Steve back in the first place.  
  
*********  
  
She doesn't need to say it out loud. He knows her well enough to read it in the line of her lips, the tilt of her head. Knows, as well, why they promised each other _when the War is over_ , not during. The whole base would have known within hours. Career, reputation, (self-)respect: inches away from being wiped out utterly. Even now, looking at her own file, the list of achievements and honours and projects, even, terrifyingly, the date of death: all this possibility tossed away for a pair of pretty blue eyes and artist's hands.

Who was the woman who stepped up after Peggy was gone, and did the things that she could not? Whose achievements did she read about in that file marked with her own name? Peggy does not think she'll ever know.  
  
*********  
  
Despite all this, Peggy cannot find it in herself to want to go back. It isn't only Steve that keeps her here.  
  
*********  
  
(Mamma took her to meet Emmeline Pankhurst once, when Peggy was very small.)  
  
*********  
  
And Tony: what did Howard do to that boy?

Well, _nothing_ , if Peggy knows Howard. He is mercurial and irritating and above all _obsessed_ with his work. He becomes fiercely and completely fond of the few people who register on his radar outside of that work, but in order to register on Howard you first must prove yourself either a) useful or b) uncommonly entertaining. After that, maintaining your friendship with him is _your_ job. He is not inconsiderate, but he does not bother being considerate if you are not either living on top of him (ie on the base) or constantly drawing his attention in some positive way.

Not to mention that this is a description of Howard at _thirty_ , let alone fifty, when Tony was actually born. How _does_ a small child uphold "their" end of that relationship? Oh, Peggy believes - and will tell Tony so if he ever asks - that Howard adored him; but adored him _in the abstract_ , as the notion of "Tony Stark, my genius kid". The silly fool would have been completely incapable of dealing with the reality of that child in his lab all day, every day, and would no more have known how to make the effort to know the person Tony became than he knows how to walk on the - erm, well. Visit Mars.

Peggy loves Howard in her own way, but someone should have told him he simply was not permitted to be anyone's father. She feels guilty that she didn't do it herself.  
  
*********  
  
Anyway: Saturday evening, out to dinner, and Steve has apparently found a place that plays the perfect jazz to dance to. They linger over the lasagne; Peggy is playing with her wineglass and wondering if she has what it takes to eat the last bites on her plate. Steve's is empty already.

"You should just join SHIELD," he says out of the blue.

"I should," says Peggy. "I mean, I did. Her Majesty's Government is happy to have me back, by all accounts. I met the Ambassador once when she was about five, at one of her mother's garden parties... tied her shoelace for her. She says I've been wasting a valuable resource."

"You've been bored, and feeling useless."

"Would you have noticed that during the war?" she asks, genuinely curious.

He looks thoughtful. "I _want_ to say yes. I don't know. Probably? I don't think I've changed that much."

"I think you're less solemn," says Peggy, smiling. "Not that you were perpetually grave before. But... I think you find things easier, now."

Steve nods thoughtfully. "I suppose it's the difference between being the only one and being among equals."

 _First among, dearest, but you always forget that_ , Peggy thinks fondly. "Field Agent status might take a while, apparently," she says. "I need to improve my computer literacy, which is an absolutely horrific term. Nor will you ever catch me in those bodysuits."

"Oh, come on. I've seen you in shorts!"

" _You've_ seen me in shorts. No one else ever has."

Steve laughs. "I should probably warn you that Clint, Maria and Coulson might spend a few years calling you _probie_. Tasha wouldn't do that, but that's because Tasha never uses anyone's nickname."

"Doesn't it make you jump when she calls Bucky _James_?"

"Always. The last person to call him that was the matron at the orphanage."

Peggy starts to laugh. "I imagine it has more pleasant associations now."

Steve chokes with laughter on a sip of wine.  
  
*********  
  
Peggy did not mean to move into Steve's room (well, floor) in the Tower with him - truly, she did not. It is a mantra she offers up occasionally to soothe her grandmother's restless ghost; her Mamma, cheerful Bohemian that she was, would have certainly approved. _But darling_ , Peggy hears her say, _he's gorgeous. Perfectly sculpted! And manners too, an impeccable combination. Manners before morals, Margaret!_ And laughs that clear warm laugh that died in the bloodstained bed when Freddie was brought into the world.

_He must have been exceptional indeed._

But no one cares here, no one condemns, not in this Tower, where all of them seem to feel themselves moving in some circle of damnation. Pepper and Tony gave Peggy her own room, but she has never used it. And it is so ridiculously easy to fall, and keep on falling. She discovers she loves Steve for a myriad of things she had not known existed in him: not just his strength and his determination and his dry humour, but the way he cooks and the films he likes and the fact that he has, on occasion, been known to snore and how he never really picks his dirty clothes up, just shoves them all into a corner and sorts out his washing once a week... all of it.  
  
*********  
  
Inevitably, it is a Wednesday once more when HYRDA rears one of its ugly heads again. Peggy Carter has been living in the future for nearly a year and has listened to enough Springsteen by now to know that he has a song with that title on one of his albums. She is settled on a bar stool at the kitchen counter with a mug of tea and the Times crossword, two days out of the second boot camp she's been made to suffer in her life and aching all over. Steve, Bucky, Natasha, Maria and Clint have all been entirely unsympathetic; none of the others know what it's like.

God-bloody-awful is what. Peggy is already drifting away from the crossword to the possibility of a fourth hot bath in two days - endless supplies of hot water being a thing she loves about the future in general and Stark Tower in particular. If she runs one now that briefing Steve is at will be over before she climbs out again, and when he comes home...

Another thing to love about the twenty-first century: she is not expected to even pretend to be coy about how much she enjoys making love with him.

Anyway, she rolls her eyes at an impenetrable pop-culture reference at 13-down and raises her mug to her lips and the windows smash with a noise like the end of the world. The leader is frankly an idiot for not wearing a mask of some kind - he has close-set green eyes and an ugly knife scar at the side of his mouth - or perhaps he just underestimates her: either way he still screams when she throws her steaming tea in his face. While he staggers she reaches for the nearest kitchen drawer, where there is a gun because both of them are soldiers and both of them have the same nightmares - turn and shoot the second one, the bullet carving a trough in his neck. Outside the Tower there comes the clatter and roar of a helicopter moving away. All the alarms are on, the elevator is running up to their floor, did they really only send three? Peggy might be a little insulted, or almost is until the third man turns out to be almost as strong as Steve. The gun goes spinning across the floor; she thinks her wrist might break, but there, lean back and knee him in the groin, her kneecap connecting unpleasantly with his more delicate anatomy, which - haha - he still notices, she steps in close and grabs his sidearm, gets a shot off awkwardly into his hip, push the flailing body away and turns into the muzzle of the gun held by the first man to come through the window. He'd be a slightly comical sight, scalded and dripping Earl Grey tea, were she not looking at it over, well, the muzzle of his gun.

Dammit. She levels her stolen weapon at his face anyway.

"You have the stone, I'm told," he says. Plain, uninteresting American accent.

"I'm afraid," says Peggy, "I left all my jewellery in 1946."

The scar stretches when he leers. "You should make him buy you more."

"You should work on your assault plans."

He shrugs. "Every now and then I underestimate a chick. It's a vice."

"Is that how you got that scar?"

Stall him, backup is almost -

\- of course, _some_ of them don't need to wait for the elevator. The Iron Man suit drops with a dull crash onto the floor by the dead man; raises a hand, palm outwards. Only Tony Stark could turn that gesture into a threat.

"You gonna put that down, or shall we just kill you?"

Scarface looks annoyed. "There was a briefing."

"I played hookey."

"Who hired you?" Peggy asks bluntly.

He lowers the gun in place of answering; she takes it off him, drops the clip out of it.

"Next time," he says, "I'll shoot you through the glass."

Peggy smiles at him, thin and cold.  
  
*********  
  
"They don't know it's cracked," says Steve.

"Well, the others are all dead," Peggy points out.

"Yeah, in retrospect, that was unfortunate," says Tony. "But why wait a year?"

"Maybe it's taken them this long to find out what happened," says Natasha.

"I'm starting to feel like our inability to work out what that stone actually was is a little embarrassing," says Bruce.

"On a scale of one to the Other Guy," says Clint, "how embarrassing exactly?"

Bruce looks at him. "Embarrassing enough to want to put you head first through a brick wall."

"Children, no brawling in the kitchen area, please," says Bucky dryly. "I think we've had enough of that for one day."

"We should consult with Director Fury again," says Thor. "He would be foolish to refuse to allow me to take the device to Asgard now."

"Can I come?" everyone else asks at once.

"Absolutely not," says Pepper from the sofa, not so much as looking up from her laptop.  
  
*********  
  
Thor gets back three days later with a look on his face that Peggy might describe as thunderous were it not such a _terrible_ pun.

"The device," he says, "that is, the framing metal, was an utter sham."

Steve says, "Oh, no."

Peggy frowns. "I don't understand."

"You will," says Natasha.

"I want his eyeballs on a platter," says Clint flatly.

"What exactly did he do this for?" asks Bruce.

"From _prison_?" adds Tony.

Thor sighs. "The stone is not itself an energy source," he explains. "It is a type of focus point I think - I did not entirely understand, which doubtlessly amused Loki to a great extent. It appears to be a part in a larger machine which he apparently desires be kept out of the hands of someone whom he would not name. Someone... something he saw in the abyss, I think. I know not what. At any rate, he refused to admit it, but it is my belief that he took action to keep the stone, whatever it was, out of the hands of the Lady Peggy's attackers. Or whomever they were working for, at least."

"You mean there's someone out there drifting around the universe whom even _Loki_ thinks is cuckoo for cocoa puffs?" says Tony disbelievingly.

Thor pulls a face. "Or perhaps he just did it to be annoying. Not even I can tell with Loki."

"That's a... distinct possibility," says Natasha.

"Bag of cats," says Bruce emphatically.

"I'm starting to feel a little left out over here," murmurs Bucky to Peggy.

"I think perhaps that's one adventure I'm happy to have missed," she whispers back.

Steve, ever pragmatic, brings the conversation back around to the relevant points. "So the guys with the guns were working for who?"

"Probably not HYDRA," says Peggy.

"It may yet have been," says Thor. "Your minds are made malleable by the power of the Tesseract. After such exposure as these HYDRA soldiers you describe, perhaps an enemy took advantage of that."

"Malleable mind-controlled HYDRA soldiers directed by a guy whom Loki Lie-Smith himself thinks is crazypants out-to-lunch," says Tony. "It's Thursday, isn't it?"

"Actually, no," says Steve.

Tony sighs. "It _should_ be Thursday for this."

"Lie-Smith?" asks Bucky.

"This is a bad land for Gods," Steve, Clint, Natasha, Tony and Bruce chorus - not quite in unison.

Bucky sighs. Thor looks interested. "Not according to my experience," he says. "Have I not had opportunity to watch this film you quote? It _is_ a film?"

"It's a book," says Tony. " _American Gods_. Um, perhaps for your taste a little..."

"Defamatory," says Natasha.

"Defamatory. Yeah."

"Returning to the original point of the conversation," says Peggy firmly - she's spent a lot of time with Pepper Potts over the last year and has come to understand that sometimes a firm, no-nonsense interruption is not so much rude as vitally necessary. (The Commandos didn't do this sort of thing, but the Commandos were professionals to the last man, which is a not a thing anyone has ever accused Tony Stark of being.) "What do we do about our inept assassin problem?"

"Well..."

"Because I personally think we're likely out of any options but to sit and wait for the next attack and hope they come in person so we can get a live one who actually _knows_ something."

"Seconded," says Natasha. "Peggy, maybe you should try not to be alone too much."

Peggy is quite proud of the way she manages not to flick her eyes to Steve. _Professionalism_ , Margaret, you are above the dirty joke and the sly innuendo.

"Oh no, I couldn't bear that," she deadpans and looks at Steve after all.

The whole table grins appreciatively.  
  
*********  
  
"Actually," says Steve, curled around her in bed that night, "I should probably send him a fruit basket or something. You know, as thanks."

Peggy shifts to look at him and rubs her foot along his calf. "That's cruel of you."

"He put a lot of time and effort into going out of his way to hurt the people I've come to care about very much," says Steve. "I don't think rubbing his nose in the fact that he didn't succeed is an enormously disproportionate reaction." He pauses. "Do you?"

"Only disproportionate in the sense of not vehement enough," says Peggy. "But then, I can be vindictive."

He grins. "I remember. You shot me once."

" _At_ you. I shot _at_ you. After you'd had your tongue down some silly blonde's throat."

"Excuse me, she had hers down mine. I obviously wasn't thinking very clearly."

" _Very_ obviously."

He catches her hip and rolls them both over easily, familiar weight settling over her, familiar warmth on her skin. Peggy wriggles into the mattress, shaking her hair back, and slides her hands up his back, over his ribcage.

"Let me show you how that's changed."

Breathless laughter. "Oh, please _do_."  
  
*********  
  
There never is a third attack. Peggy and Maria theorise that someone, somewhere, took note of Thor's visit to Asgard, and has adjusted their thinking accordingly. Scarface gets a nice meaty gaol sentence; Peggy consigns him to hell in the privacy of her own mind.  
  
*********  
  
Not long after that Tony and Bruce finally agree that there is no mysterious, fatal time traveller's radiation clinging to the clothes and belongings Peggy had on her when she Came Through, and give them back - well, that's the official story, Peggy is relatively certain that they just forgot they still had her things. She had forgotten it herself. Her old clothes look strange to her now, out of place, like an outfit from childhood she barely remembers actually wearing.

Steve finds the photograph she kept in her pocket-book almost immediately.

" _This_ photo?" he says, mock-scandalised. "Of all the photos of me that exist in the world, you kept _this_ one?"

Anxious, exhausted, wind-blown hair and dog tags, staring across the camp without even having noticed the cameraman.

"Yes," says Peggy simply. She sees something in him then that she had not expected: blazing joy, love, triumph. Oh, you bloody fool, did you think I loved you for what you were, and not who?

No, not truly - but some old fears are hard to shake.

"I love you," he tells her.  
  
*********  
  
When Fury finally caves and hands her (back) her badge, the others throw her a party. Bucky's supposedly ended in chaos and debauchery, which Peggy is only too happy to believe, but she never finds out how her own ended, because Steve hands her a glass of champagne and says, "Agent Carter," just the way he always used to, and she wants to climb to the roof of Stark Tower and crow that tiny, all-important triumph at the sky so she _does_ , and then locks the rooftop door behind them.  
  
*********  
  
One morning in the summer he finds her curled in a chair before the computer screen, skimming files upon files on Sir Freddie Carter.

"My Pater would have been proud," Peggy says quietly. "Sir Freddie!" She chuckles wetly. Her obnoxious irritating blond-haired anything-but-angelic little brother died ten years ago; a heart attack at Ascot. That makes her laugh as well. "Bloody little fool, even when he was a boy he loved those animals more than his own silly life!"

"You haven't looked for him before."

"I was afraid to. I didn't want to go from one type of mourning to another."

He leans over the chair and wraps his arms around her shoulders. "I've met Sharon," he admits.

Peggy straightens. "What's she like?"

Steve smiles. "A lot like you, actually. American accent, which was... disconcerting."

"Don't make fun."

"I did like her."

"That's good. I'm glad. You would have liked Freddie as well... oh, this is stupid - I've not even seen him since before the War - oh _Freddie_ , you damned idiot..."

He holds her in silence while she cries. When she is sure she can speak again without hiccoughing, she says, "Come home with me. Come home to London, to Suffolk, to Brighton and Cumbria - I want to go home, Steve. England's green and pleasant land, and all the rest of it... I fought for it, I've a right to it, I want to go _home_. Come with me."

Peggy needs it as she has needed nothing she can remember needing in her life before now. All the silly details of her home that have shaped her whether she knew it or not: she will never get them back, because the War destroyed them, and then Time. But she can have their echoes and their shadows and their descendents: she can have the coast at Brighton and the Old Man of Coniston, she can have all the places she remembers from childhood. She can have English rainstorms and English strawberries and English voices and draughty uncomfortable English bedrooms and overgrown graveyards where her parents lie buried and the great majestic sweep of London, the sun rising over the valley of the Thames, the foundation of her life and the home of her heart.

Steve says, "Of course I will."  
  
*********  
  
She wanders the Embankment with her hands in her trouser pockets and smiles to herself to think that less than two years ago, she'd not believed she'd ever see this view again without the anti-aircraft guns, the air raid shelters. Finest hour indeed! Nonsense. All desperation, ferocity and the skin of their teeth.

Still... that's not nothing, is it? They pulled through. They're holding steady, somehow, improbably.

So is Peggy, one way or another.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [and don't you dare be late [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1824778) by [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/pseuds/blackglass)




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